Tag: Twitter

  • The All-updates update

    A sea turtle

    This is what is happening, in bite-sized updates:

    That whole selling our Austin rental house thing

    Sold! We got three offers the first day and one the second day and then no more offers. We were told by our fantastic realtor that this is common in this market and the good news was that two of the first three offers were serious and we got into a little bidding war situation. We came out about 5 percent above asking price and we closed on Friday, so a combination of a scorching hot Austin seller’s market and good timing means we came out pretty well ahead.

    That wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t put a big, scary amount of money into fixing the house up for sale, but the investment and the worry paid off.

    Now I need some margaritas to celebrate.

    Travel!

    Because of kids, we rarely go anywhere, but this year has suddenly been full of travel. We did Disney World and shortly after that, I went to my 20-year reunion in Oklahoma. We ended up going on a shorter second vacation two weeks ago to sunny S. Padre Island which the girls enjoyed almost as much as Disney.

    On that trip, I got to really relax and enjoy myself, eat a lot of seafood and see some rescued sea turtles (above), which I immediately chose as my new spirit animals. As opposed to a cranky crab, which I can be when I’m not at the beach (below).

    Crab, man

    My wife took a just-concluded work trip, so I’ve been juggling taking care of the kids with work, which has left me exhausted. But the kids behaved, which they always seem to do when one of us is away (do they think they’re in trouble or something?), so it went well. My wife will be taking her turn going solo when I go cover SXSW V2V next month in Las Vegas. I like Vegas, but it’s a work trip and it’s no fun going there alone. Hope the conference is exciting and has good energy.

    Novel

    I feel weird saying much about this because like all superstitious writers, I fear the jinx, but the quick status update is that I took a few days away from the material and have since spent the last week and a half just reading back through it without trying to edit as I go. I was expecting to be horrified and to want to rewrite huge swaths, but instead I’ve been surprised by stuff I don’t even remember writing and pleased with a lot of it. Next step will be to give it a hard 2nd-draft edit/revision and to get some feedback from a very tiny group of people I asked to read the first draft. Not sure what’ll happen after that, to be perfectly honest but I’m definitely not going to just put it away. This year for me has been primarily about this project and very little else.

    Things that have brought me joy lately

    This video (which I was very late to seeing), this song, this blog post, this Tumblr, this T-shirt, the photo below.

    Don’t worry, we were able to reclaim her arm from the seaweed virus before she ate Megatokyo.

    Stuff I wrote

    My Digital Savant column last week was a roundup of reviews: the video games The Last of Us (depressing!) and Gunpoint (clever and funny!), as well as the Nikon D5200 SLR camera.

    This week’s column was about the nonprofit Austin Free-Net, which has been around since 1995 and has been doing great work in the Austin community to bring Internet access and computer services to those who wouldn’t otherwise get it.

    I also did some Digital Savant Micro stories about clickjacking and about Google’s just-announced Chromecast dongle.

    One new thing at work is that it looks like I’ll be doing more video stuff soon. More on that as it happens.

    Pacific-Specific

    Monkeys who hump and more

    The Space Monkeys! really liked the movie Pacific Rim(which I still need to see) and this week did a whole lot of sexing in honor of “Hump Day.”

    Give them a Facebook Like, won’t you?

    I made some tacos and they ended up in a book

    Through one of those random Austin things that happens from time to time, a friend of mine found himself working on a book about breakfast tacos and he asked if I’d like to be included. This involved me making some tacos and taking them to a photo shoot and writing up a little bit about my love for and history with the humble breakfast taco.

    The book turned out beautifully and a launch party for it drew a huge crowd.

    Buy a copy. I promise it’s worth your money and time.

    In the taco book

    On Twitter

    Two out-of-the ordinary things that happened on Twitter recently.

    The night of the Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman verdict, I tweeted something I thought was very vague and of course that’s the thing that people latch on to retweet hundreds of times.

    You can’t really see the responses or how some people reposted it anymore, but what was interested was the responses said way more about the person than the original Tweet did about me, I think.  It was a very weird, bad week on multiple fronts and in some ways it just summed up the bummer that was in the air that night.

    The other Tweet was much more recent and came from my daughter. I think it may have had something to do with a dinosaur exhibit she just saw, which must mean she thinks her father is about to become extinct:

    I wish I’d had a good response to that other than, “Damn. You got me. Well done.”

  • Real life

    Cloudy

     

    For the last couple of years, I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone writing stuff for work and for freelance that was almost exclusively tech-related. Even the fun, goofy stuff I wrote for CNN last year was all based in the real world, all of it structured as commentary or essay even if it wasn’t completely meant to be taken as super-serious.

    Even when I was recapping TV and doing the movie trailer videos, those were grounded in the reality of what I was writing about. These weren’t universes I created, I was talking about them more like a reporter, telling you what they were about from an outsider’s perspective.

    mexcentricsNow, outside of work, the bulk of my writing for the last few months has been fiction. I’m working on two things that I’m alternating between apart from writing comics about monkeys in space and just finished revisions on a sketch comedy show going up in March that I was able to work on with some close friends. Then there’s another thing that may or may not happen in the audio world, but fingers crossed because it would be a lot of fun, I think. If I’m not posting here (he said, looking at the date of the last entry), it’s because I’m doing those things most every night.

    It’s really different writing the fiction things. Fun and freeing and putting me in a mindset that I’d neglected for a long while. It’s fun to float between worlds like this and, being that I never got into drugs or heavy drinking, the only way I really know how to do it.

    Real real life has been kind of sweet lately. The kids have gone from pitiless marauders of the fall to more manageable sweethearts of the spring. We booked a big family trip for later this year. I’ve gotten to see and catch up with more friends in the last month and a half than the previous six months combined, which was one of my big New Year’s not-so-much-a-resolution-but-just-something-I-want-to-do things. But, like you, I deal with toxic people sometimes or walk away in a stupor due to layers of bureaucracy or hear about something on Twitter that is so dumb, so asinine that I can’t help but talk about it like everyone else.

    Real life is beautiful and magic, but it’s also random and mundane, sometimes at the same time and finding beauty and magic in all that is the challenge. (And, really, why we write.)

    I wouldn’t call it an escape hatch, exactly, but more like a really diverting puzzle that you’re continually trying to solve. When pieces lock together, it’s so satisfying that it makes all the other stuff so much easier to deal with.

     

    Work stuff

    Busy couple of weeks leading into some insanely busy of weeks coming in March for South by Southwest Interactive.

    Two pieces I wrote after the whole Total Frat Move thing got a really nice response.

    First, I was lucky enough to catch a Tweet in passing last month from a woman named Vicki Flaugher, who was getting ready to shut down her account and give up social media. It was completely by chance that I was about to write a column on that very idea and when I asked if she’d chat with me, she was open and honest about why she needs to take a break from Twitter, Facebook and everything else.

    The column got a good response from other people who feel overwhelmed by their daily online rituals. Vicki ended up writing a follow-up piece for Bulldog Reporter where she said some very kind words.

    The girls outside

    Another column that got some positive response (and one negative Letter to the Editor) was one I wrote about the challenges of raising girls in a tech-heavy house when sometimes I just want them to go play outside or put down the iPad. My wife, who usually reads or sees most photos or text I’m going to put online about our family in advance, didn’t get a chance to read this one before it got published and I was scared to death that she was going to tell me she didn’t agree with my point of view or that she thought I was overestimating the amount of thought we’ve given it. It turns out, to my relief, that she liked the story and so did other folks in our family who were thrilled to see a photo of Lilly and Carolina in the paper. (I cropped it so you can barely tell, but Carolina on the left there is lifting her shirt and sticking out her belly in an obvious homage to Tracy Morgan.)

    Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman
    Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman

    I did a roundup of places to play video games and tabletop games in Austin. It was a lot of work putting it together, but as part of my research, I got to spend an afternoon playing video games at Pinballz and that was an incredible amount of fun.

    Last week, the column was a roundup of South by Southwest Interactive 2013 stuff we know so far. In about three weeks, the fest returns and I’m going to be covering it again. I’m trying to stay positive and not get too overwhelmed, but it’s pretty much taking over everything right now and I’m riding that wave.

    Photo by me for the American-Statesman

    And the new column that just went up is about the ongoing influence of SimCity, which will have a new version out next month. I spoke to some Austin students who used SimCity 4 Deluxe to build a city 150 years in the future. Then they built a physical model of that city and are taking it to Washington D.C. to compete in a Future City competition.


    Digital Savant Micros have been published on the topics of “What is Facebook’s Social Graph?” “What is Vine?”, “Who has the best wireless service in Austin?” and “What is a sound bar?”


    I had a humorous Twitter spat with Verizon about unused data and I covered TEDxAustin 2013, which once again was worth spending a Saturday listening to people inspire you and get you to think about big ideas. The post I wrote is so comprehensive it took me two days to write, which perhaps is overkill, but recapping for so long at TWOP blessed and cursed me with endurance and a need to finish what I started.

    Wow, seeing that list all put together just made me really, really exhausted. Excuse me while I go take a small nap before SXSW Interactive starts.

     

    Other stuff

    Meany and the zombiesI mentioned last time that the monkeys from space that we do comics about started a Twitter account.

    The comic is chugging along. We did one about zombies and another about that cute little Iranian monkey that was blasted the fuck into space against his will. And we did one about poop, which with us is kind of a given.

    This weekend, my wife went on a business-related trip (the business in this case is Zumba, but that’s a story for another blog entry, maybe, perhaps) so I watched the girls on my own, which was terrifying at first and then pretty OK in the end. We theorized on the phone about whether the girls behave better when one of us isn’t around because they’re not competing for the attention of two parents at the same time or if maybe having one parent out of town freaked them out just enough to be obedient. Whatever happened, this weekend was not the crazy, Mr. Mom comedy of hijinks I thought it would be. In fact, it was kind of wonderful.

    The big mistake I made was watching Eraserhead for the first time on Hulu, which put a bunch of Criterion Collection movies out for free (free if you don’t mind annoying, tone-shattering commercials every 10 minutes). I’m a huge David Lynch fan and this was the only movie of his that I hadn’t watched all the way through.

    Well, that was a big mistake. Not because the movie is bad (it’s brilliant) and not because I didn’t like it (I found it incredibly disturbing yet weirdly relatable), but… well… mewling tiny worm baby and terrified father. It did not exactly set the best tone for me for the weekend.

    But then we went to the bounce castle warehouse and the kids ran around for three hours while I sat and read and all was well.

  • Total Work Moves

    When your job involves a lot of constant deadlines, you have a lot of, “If I can just get through this week…” moments. Sometimes it’s a whole month and last year it actually got to the, “If I can just get to mid-December…” point.

    Last week, I knew that I had a very large story due for the Sunday paper and that as soon as that was done I was going to have to turn around and produce my weekly column, too. I spent about a week trying to knock out smaller assignments and to get everything else out of the way so that freight train could pass without any interruptions.

    Things worked out fine, like they always do. I knew this, inside, that things would work themselves out one way or another.

    But there’s always that scary moment when you wonder if you really have any idea what you’re going to write and if it’s going to come out in what my mom sometimes calls a chorro (a flood or torrent in Spanish, or if you’re being gross, a diarrhea) or if you’re just going to sit there and wait and nothing magical happens.

    Luckily, as happens most of the time when I’m under pressure, it was the chorro.

    pnWTB

    This is a weird story, so bear with me. One of the articles I wrote last week ran in Sunday’s paper. It’s about a very popular website called Total Frat Move. That website, which is based in Austin, has turned into a very successful web empire which spawned a book that is already a New York Times bestseller and will likely become a movie.

    I met with the guys who run the site a few weeks ago thinking it would be no more than a short blog post or book write-up. An editor instead suggested I do it as a Sunday lead story. Then the pressure started and I tried to figure out a way to say something more than “Here’s a website, here’s a book.” I transcribed my interview notes and did a lot of online reading. I read the book itself, which was kind of a disturbing and problematic read for me being that I have two daughters I hope will go to college one day. There’s a lot of ugly humor on the site and in the book, stuff that even in the guise of being a joke or satire is still really rough to read for even a jaded-ass, South Park-watching vulgarian such as myself.

    I tried to convey that in the story, a story that ended up being much longer than I anticipated and written in a tone that tries to be neutral in the face of material that we would normally not highlight and put in front of our readers.

    Clearly, it wasn’t what the subjects of the story expected:

    https://twitter.com/WRBolen/status/295745186548568064

    But I’m kind of proud of this weird, long story I wrote. I don’t know that anyone else would have written it the way I did and sometimes that’s a pretty significant kind of victory when you stick words next to each other for a living.

    The other piece I wrote last week was a Monday column about taking a break from or giving up social media completely as Vicki Flaugher is doing.

    Like anyone who’s been using social media for more than a few years, I’ve fantasized about massively pruning the number of people I connect to, taking a long break or just walking away. The work I do doesn’t really allow for not using social media and most of the time (OK, half of the time), I really do enjoy and get a lot out of these online connections. But it can be tiring, stressful and time-wasting.

    elWnQ_immzfGcL_8J7wUngpCxj4wa3lz3aZyVvRHxFI

    Speaking of exhaustion, last week, I wrote a column about transmedia storytelling, specifically authors who are mixing book writing with online game worlds, interactive games, real-world events and other new media. This is not new, of course. Authors have experimented with this kind of stuff even through the early days of computers and CD-ROMs and all through the Internet era. But the sheer ambitious some of these authors are showing in carrying out their vision is inspiring and a little intimidating.

    I say this as someone who’s spent the last couple of years trying to write a Goddamn Book™. The idea that instead of working on one book or two, you just up and say, “How about 7 or 10 plus an MMO?” makes me want to go down a gigantic popcorn bowl of amphetamines. (No, not really, it actually makes me want to nap.)

    Photo by me! Austin billboard

    Other bits: I wrote about a woman who won a billboard from Ben & Jerry’s for an Instagram photo she shot. In the Digital Savant Micro feature, I defined “Gorilla Glass” and explained Facebook’s Social Graph.

    Bobbo and Meany

    We’re still diligently working to revitalize our “Space Monkeys!” franchise after that very long absence.

    Comics come out every Wednesday, like these two recent ones.

    In addition to the Facebook page I’ve mentioned, they now have a Twitter account, too, where Bobbo and Meany talk about ship and space stuff. Give ‘er a follow, why not?

    Other random things that happened recently:

    I bought a swing set for the girls. That’s an adventure I’ll probably write about in full after it’s set up.

    We went to the circus! It sounded like it might be terrible but instead it was the opposite of terrible, which is CIRCUS AWESOME! Seriously had a great time and these daughters of mine loved it.

    I wrote 50+ pages of something in less than a month which must mean I’m pretty excited about it. If it keeps on at that pace, I hope to have some news of it to share by summer.

    Started playing around with Vine and made this video:

    Took this picture of the girls on a beautiful walk around the neighborhood:

    January walk

    So it’s been a good January. A good year so far.

  • I Tumblr for ya / Flavor Country

    I went to Winston-Salem / Wake Forest University this week, which as near as I can tell specializes in tobacco legends and beautiful campuses with sexy trees. I will tell you about that in a bit.

    First, let me fill you in on what I’ve been working on the last few weeks on these, our very best Internet delivery systems.

    Last week, I did a Digital Savant column explaining how to get up and running on Tumblr. Tumblr, which I have sometimes derogatoraliciously compared to Livejournal, is actually a really great, simple blog platform and if you are already a Tumblr Pro, this will probably seem pretty elementary to you.

    I started a Tumblr blog a while back when we were still doing Age of Lasers and a second one I set up with just my name lay fallow for a few years, Tumbled, if you will.

    So I revived it and got back in there, tickling the Tumblr until I felt satisfied I could properly discuss it. Your own satisfaction may vary.

    That same week, I did a Digital Savant Micro about WordPress, the software running this here very blog thing you are just now mind-melding with. Seems like those two things would go well together, like peanut butter and … a butter knife?

    I wrote about Yellow Cab Austin’s new tech upgrades (which will be part of a future column on Austin transportation stuff) and tomorrow’s column is about how we Photoshop ourselves online. The Micro for this week is about Apple’s new Passbook app in iOS 6.

    You may have noticed in there that statesman.com and austin360.com have been completely redesigned. It’s part of an entire content management system upgrade we’re doing that has been the subject of lots of training and discussion in the newsroom. It’s a lot to get used to, but we’re all trying to keep our heads up through so much change this year.

    We also made the transition to have our pages laid out elsewhere and the lights went out officially on our copy desk. I would talk more about this, but honestly it would just make me incredibly sad and blubbery. I’ll just say that some of these people shifted into other jobs and that’s fantastic, and other people left and that sucks so hard that every one of us working there feels it, badly.

    It happens every now and then that someone will ask me in an email to go somewhere to talk (or to ask questions so that other people can talk while I nod with understanding).

    Often, these conversations end abruptly when I say I can’t do it because it takes work to go somewhere, even if the talking itself is not as much work as the going. Things usually break down over travel, which I try to avoid when it involves being away from home for more than one night, or money, which is frequently not offered at all.

    Sometimes, I’ll get asked what it will take to get me to go somewhere and I’ll throw out some information and then never hear back, as if the information was trapped in a bottle thrown to sea.

    But maybe once a year, all the details work out and I actually go somewhere.

    This time, it was to North Carolina to moderate a forum on cyber-communication.

    At one point, I wasn’t sure if this was to be a solo presentation or if I were going to moderate, but as the weeks got closer, I double checked to make sure I didn’t need to be spending many backbreaking hours in the PowerPoint salt mines (salt mines with a very bland border and text that slides in from the right) or that there was no A/V I needed to work out on my end.

    This thing, it turns out, was more geared toward radio as it was a public radio station (and the generous Forsyth Education Foundation) brining me in. They were more concerned with getting decent audio than showing faces on a screen. So I did a pre-interview with the station (click here to hear me ramble about tech and kids for five minutes).

    I coordinated with the other panelists over emails, putting together a list of questions and when I arrived, we went through everything again, resulting in what I thought was a really good panel covering a pretty broad set of topics, from cyberbullying to online defamation to what the future is for digital natives. You can hear and read some highlights from the panel here.

    As for the trip itself — you guys! Have you been to North Carolina?! It’s totally beautiful and awesome! Everyone was super nice and the trees were all clumped together and endless and I ate shrimp and grits while two charming older people regaled me with tales of their college years and the place I stayed was a B&B in Old Salem, which is like hundreds of years old and… wow. For the fewer than 20 hours I was there, I just kept wishing I could stay longer to check out the bakeries and walk around and just experience it a little more because what I saw was great. I saw a statue of R.J. Reynolds! The Nabisco guy! (He’s not the Nabisco guy.)

    I mean, check this out:

    That thing pumps real water!

    And this fire station probably predates actual fire!

    My breakfast was a really great feast, which this photo only shows a fraction of. See that? That granola is homemade, yo!

    The fun continued after the panel when my hosts took me out for drinks. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t drunk. I mean can you get drunk from two mint juleps? Oh, you can? If you’re a gigantic pussy?

    Well, that’s me, I guess, because I went back to my room and started Tweeting strangely about how much I love the trees in Winston-Salem.

    I also sent some @replies that probably sounded even worse to anyone who saw them out of context:

    The next morning, I may have expressed some regret.

    And… finally:

    So all that happened.

    And I got a pretty photo before I left.

    I haven’t forgotten that I promised you a funny car story. That’s coming, I swear, very soon.

    Something else is coming, not sure how soon, but it’s on the way. Here’s a little visual clue:

  • Cranky

  • Summer days unpacked

    Every year, it’s begun to feel like since I moved to New Braunfels in 2004, I complain around August or September that I felt like I missed the whole summer, but that’s probably because I haven’t thought to quit my job and be a river bum all summer, tubing all day and sleeping outside staring at the stars all night.

    Come to think of it, that sounds kind of crappy, at least the sleeping outside part. Where would I plug in the HEPA filter?

    Instead of working on my (not really in need of help) tan, I’ve been mostly indoors, working, and this last week there was so much output I began to feel like I should just stop talking for a little while. The week began with a new CNN.com tech column that I pitched when the summer started and I saw that my DVR was about to make for a steep climb for the next few months. It’s about how much old crap we have hanging out in our digital video recorder and the stuff you notice when you’re digging back through months or years of old programming.

    My Digital Savant column is rolling along. My second weekly print column was a list of intermediate/advanced tips for Twitter now that it’s matured quite a bit since the last time we did a primer on it, back in 2008. Really good reaction on this one and it got passed around quite a bit on the social media sites, especially on Twitter itself.

    The third column, which runs in tomorrow’s paper, is about the Livescribe smart pen, which I’ve been using for the last few months. It’s replaced my old digital audio recorder and notepads for taking interview notes and I’m surprised more reporters aren’t using something like it. (Or, really just it. I’m not aware of any product that does exactly what it does.)

    I also had a story run in the paper last week about Spotify, the online music service that recently arrived in the U.S. I’m still using it, but still not sure what I’ll do once the Premium trial runs out this month. I’m not sure how much I’d like it if I couldn’t use the mobile app and I’m not sure I can justify $10 a month on music given that I already pay for Sirius XM and carry my entire music collection with me on my phone every day. I ran a long blog post with all the comments that readers and social media friends shared about their thoughts on Spotify.

    I also had two pieces in the paper about South by Southwest Interactive raising its rates for the 2012 fest.

    Despite all the output, it’s been feeling a little lazy here, at least at home. We’ve got a break from videos for a few months, a writing project I’m working on with a friend hasn’t really gotten off the ground yet and apart from working on some jokes for a friend who’s hosting an event and very short iPad reviews for Kirkus, I’ve mostly been spending my nights catching up on Breaking Bad (only about 7 episodes left and I’ll be up to date!), reading some books including the first three volumes of The Walking Dead, finishing off the last book of Y: The Last Man and savoring Spoiled, a really well-written and hilarious young adult novel by The Fug Girls.

    As much as I’d like to be outside enjoying the summer, it’s been so hot this year for so long that we can’t even take the girls outside in the evenings anymore unless they’re going to be submerged in cool water or we’re taking them directly to another place that’s indoors. It sucks not to be able to take your kids to the park, even, when it’s still 105 degrees as the sun’s going down.

    So we’re going to Schlitterbahn when we can, going to indoor places like the New Braunfels Children’s Museum or just shopping. Maybe we’ll make it down to the beach before summer’s over.

    But not to complain. I’m actually enjoying the rest and kind of digging how busy work has been and how busy home has not.